The hurt in his eyes speaks to me more than the pressure on my arms and I blurt out, “Backyard. It’s in the backyard—buried near the tree where you first kissed me—”
Xavier silences me with his lips as they crush mine. He lets me go abruptly before I even think to protest. The growl from Reed says that it was long enough for him to die. Xavier’s face turns toward Reed as he straightens. He holds up his hand to Reed and says, “Soon.” With that, he turns and strides away to the car he came in. The black frame is now dotted with petals as it lies on its side, having been blown there by whatever magic had come at us across the snow-covered lawn.
He pushes the car over, righting it. The screech of metal rubbing metal hurts my ears when Xavier nearly tears the door open and gets in. It takes him a couple of slams to get it to close again. The engine roars to life just before the tires kick up clods of snow, dirt, and roses. The car fishtails onto the driveway as Xavier speeds away from us.
“What the HELL was that all about?” Russell yells to us from where he’s helping Anya up from the ground.
“Russell, figure out a way to protect the house until we relocate.” Reed doesn’t try to explain further, but sprints to the separate garage where he keeps his cars. Disappearing inside, one of the doors lifts slowly, revealing a white Lamborghini. Before the door is all the way open, the car lurches from the darkness and flies across the drive to where I’ve gotten to my feet.
“Please get in,” Reed says to me through the open window. As I retract my wings and comply, Zephyr appears at Reed’s window. “Be ready to leave when I call.”
Zephyr doesn’t smile when he says, “I will make the arrangements.”
“Shut the door, Evie,” Reed says with his hand on the stick shift. When I do, the car rockets down the driveway. Instead of applying the foot break near the end of it, Reed pulls the emergency break as he turns the wheel. The car slides sideways onto the street; he releases the hand break, and pushes down on the accelerator, burying the needle. We swerve dangerously on the road every so often as we hit patches of ice on our way out of Crestwood. Reed immediately corrects the wheel so that we hardly lose any speed.
“Where are we going?” I ask as I scramble to put on my seatbelt.
“We’re trying to catch up to Xavier,” Reed replies. I want to ask him to slow down, but I can see by the tension in his forearms that he’d be going faster if it were at all possible. “We have to get to what’s buried in the backyard before he does.”
“Why?’
“Because Xavier wants it bad enough to leave you with me until he gets it. It’s a ring, right? Like this one?” Reed holds up his hand, displaying my uncle’s class ring, which I now have serious doubts about it truly ever having been a class ring.
I nod. “It’s a ring. It’s his ring,” I clarify, “but it doesn’t look like that one.”
“Do you have any idea what it does?”
I shake my head. “How do you know it does something?”
Reed ignores my questions and counters. “How did you come by it?”
“He asked me to wear it.”
“For protection?”
My face reddens. “No. It was because he was my friend. We were friends—”
“Friends?” Reed asks skeptically.
My cheeks flush more. “He was sort of my boyfriend when he gave it to me—but he was so weird about it,” I try to explain. “He was so hot and cold all the time that I was never really sure where I stood with him...but he insisted that I wear it on a chain around my neck, like a pendant.”
“This ring that you gave me, Evie, it just protected me.”
“It did?”
“It lit up with a blue glow. It cut through your magic when I needed to get to you. I fell right through your magic barrier to the other side.”
“How did it do that?”
“I don’t know, but it fought off the evil invitation Sheol just sent you. Whatever was controlling that magic couldn’t harm me the way it did the rest of you,” Reed says. “I can only assume it was because of this ring. Xavier recognized it. He must know what it does.”
We pass by a frozen lake on our way out of town. “Invitation? How can you say that was an invitation? They were trying to kill us.”
“But they backed off. It was an invitation to you, presented with a warning, and wrapped—” reaching toward me, Reed pulls a petal from my hair and shows it to me, “—in a love letter. Sheol just invited you to join them.”
A bone-deep chill runs through me. “Or everyone I love dies,” I say with a hollow voice.
“Not everyone. I have Jim’s ring. We need that other ring. We can’t let Xavier get it, not until we know what it does.”